Jerome Lecat discusses TCO for cloud storage

Jérôme Lecat /
May 19, 2015

The Cloud is changing the way companies and employees operate. Jerome Lecat, CEO of Scality, Inc., told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s production team, at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015 that it’s important for companies to collaborate during this transition.

“We believe that a few years from now, five to 10 years from now, the people running infrastructure will run infrastructure large scale,” he said. “If you have a small scale system, you’ll just outsource it to the Cloud. You’ll use a Cloud service whether it’s Salesforce … or Office 365. So the people running infrastructure will be doing it large-scale, and they will be doing this in an architecture that is essentially software-based. We need a place for the different software components to be able to talk together, to find how to interface with each other. We are all building this future together, and OpenStack is the place to meet, to discuss.”

Staying competitive

Given the current demand for always-on access to data, companies need to step up their service if they want to stay competitive, Lecat said.

“Life patterns, work patterns have changed. People expect to have access to their information,” he explained. “So we expect access 24/7, every day, even on Christmas Day. Scality, toward that, we offer SLAs — if it’s not available, we pay our customers back. It’s as simple as that. Same thing about data protection, by the way. I still hear conversations about data protection. It should not be a conversation anymore. I mean, there’s enough technology out there to protect the data very well.”

Companies also need to provide better durability, which is not just a marketing buzzword.“Our idea of storage is that our business is to make your data secure and to guarantee you won’t lose it,” he stated. “So we think it’s pretty basic, and we think that if you’re playing in the storage world, you need to keep data secure. So we’re convinced of that, we’re developing technology for that and we’re paying out if we miss our target.”

Generating better power consumption and storage

What’s next for the storage industry?

“To go from petabyte to exabyte and zetabyte, we need to get better on power consumption, so all technologies that three to five years from now will be able to store with less power consumption are interesting to me,” Lecat said. “There are the new IP drives from Seagate as an example of that. Another example of that is some flash technologies that you can power off and still remember data. Anything that’s going to be about very large quantities of data stored without wiring and electricity.”